In the early 1870s, Thomas Alva Edison declared \u201cThe time was right\u201d to introduce the stock ticker and the printing telegraph.<\/p>\n
It was. Americans, grasping the benefits of his inventions and finding them affordable in relation to those benefits, willingly purchased Mr. Edison\u2019s inventions; he and the capitalists who invested in the enterprise grew rich.<\/p>\n
As the 1870s rolled on, Mr. Edison declared \u201cthe time was right\u201d to offer Americans the telephone, the phonograph, and the incandescent electric light bulb. By 1888, he had decided \u201cthe time was right\u201d to offer Americans the motion picture camera and projector.<\/p>\n
He was usually right. Whole industries grew up around his inventions.<\/p>\n
Now, 120 years later, Nissan president and CEO Carlos Ghosn declared on Nov. 16, 2009 \u201cThe time is right for electric cars,\u201d as top executives with more than a dozen companies, including the Nissan Motor Co., Fedex Corp., electric utility PG&E Corp. and battery developers A123 Systems Inc. and Johnson Controls-Saft announced the formation of an \u201cElectrification Coalition to lay the groundwork for millions of electric cars to reach U.S. highways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Ghosn said the auto industry was working quickly to develop zero-emissions cars in response to concerns about oil security, tighter emissions requirements in the United States and elsewhere and a public thirst for alternative vehicles not tied to petroleum.<\/p>\n
Ghosn said the world market of 600 million vehicles is expected to expand to 2.5 billion vehicles in 2050. The group envisions a network of electric vehicles in six to eight cities in the short term and an expansion across the country, making 75 percent of all vehicle miles traveled powered by electricity by 2040.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no pie-in-the-sky here,\u201d intoned Frederick W. Smith, FedEx\u2019s chairman, president and CEO. \u201cIt\u2019s simply a matter of organization, a matter of will and a matter of execution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well … and that small matter of getting Congress to hand them a couple hundred billion dollars seized from taxpayers against their will, of course.<\/p>\n
Participants \u201cacknowledged that the proposals would be expensive and would require a major commitment from Congress,\u201d The Associated Press reports. \u201cThe group\u2019s blueprint would cost more than $120 billion over eight years and promote tax credits for the installation of advanced batteries, loan guarantees for the retooling of plants, and tax credits for public charging stations and home charging equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wow.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately the consumer will make the judgment about where this country goes, but from the standpoint of public policy we can set the stage for it,\u201d said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who joined the group for its announcement.<\/p>\n
Actually, electric, steam, and other types of highway motive power were widely tried 120 years ago. \u201cThe consumer\u201d chose gasoline. And if \u201cthe consumer\u201d should again pass judgment that he doesn\u2019t want to drive around in flimsy little golf-cart vehicles with limited range, the manufacture of batteries for which may turn out to be an environmental nightmare … Messrs. Ghosn, Smith, and company will pay the taxpayers back?<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we\u2019re running out of fossil fuels!\u201d proponents will shriek.<\/p>\n
A) No we\u2019re not. We\u2019re not drilling all our available oil by a long shot; we\u2019ve got enough coal to last centuries; increased coal use would free up oil for highway use, and in a last resort turning coal into liquid fuel is perfectly do-able. Besides, b) we were also \u201crunning out of whale oil\u201d in 1857. Lo and behold, free-market entrepreneurs invented and developed the petroleum industry over the next 50 years, without a dime of government subsidies. The whales survived.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut evil foreigners can cut off our oil supply at any time!\u201d<\/p>\n
Really? OPEC can\u2019t even keep its members in line on price and production quotas. How long would the king of Arabia — or any conceivable claimant — keep his throne if he stopped selling oil? And if he stopped selling only to us, how would he stop his primary customers from turning around and re-selling to us?<\/p>\n
Besides, America is still a major oil producer, sitting on the world\u2019s largest known reserves unlike, say … Japan in 1941.<\/p>\n
And finally: Who says electric cars don\u2019t use fossil fuels? When you plug them in, their batteries get recharged by sucking power that moves over transmission lines from … power plants. Those power plants, in the foreseeable real world, run on coal, nuclear power, or natural gas. Which kind do the \u201cgreens\u201d want us to build lots more of?<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a different idea: Let Nissan Motor Co., Fedex, PG&E, A123 Systems, and Johnson Controls-Saft gather investment capital on the private market by convincing would-be investors this scheme will eventually turn a big profit WITHOUT a tax subsidy. The investors put in their money by buying stocks and bonds and take the risk; when the whole things pays off they make healthy profits.<\/p>\n
What? They don\u2019t want to do it that way? Because they can\u2019t actually show any likelihood of big profits without the big taxpayer subsidies?<\/p>\n
Hmm.<\/p>\n
Did Thomas Alva Edison promise to develop the telephone, the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb … as soon as Congress handed him a few billion in tax money to \u201cset up a test network in six to eight cities\u201d?<\/p>\n
In his recent book, \u201cHamilton\u2019s Curse: How Jefferson\u2019s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution,\u201d historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo discusses the Hamiltonian vision of a strong central government directing the nation\u2019s economy in place of the supposedly \u201cinefficient, haphazard\u201d free market — and the disasters to which such meddling by \u201cwe-know-better\u201d government experts give rise.<\/p>\n
Henry Clay, for instance, though generally regarded as a \u201cgreat statesman,\u201d adopted Hamilton\u2019s belief in the supposed need for a powerful national government and sought federal funding for government-financed canals, railroads, and other \u201cinfrastructure investments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clay\u2019s theory was that the free market would not make such investments. But professor DiLorenzo shows how such government projects almost invariably turned into costly failures that lined the pockets of the few (can you say \u201cColorado oil shale?\u201d) while devouring huge amounts of public funds.<\/p>\n
Entrepreneurs working in the free market, on the other hand — see James J. Hill\u2019s Great Northern Railroad — demonstrated they could indeed gather capital and make profits building roads, railroads, and other projects without Congressional \u201clubrication.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHamilton\u2019s foolish ideas about economics and government power reign supreme in the United States today,\u201d reports George C. Leef, director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, in his recent review of professor DiLorenzo\u2019s book.<\/p>\n
\u201cHamilton\u2019s curse costs us dearly. … The economy is far less prosperous than it would be if it weren\u2019t for the tremendous diversion of resources into political boondoggles instead of productive enterprises.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the early 1870s, Thomas Alva Edison declared \u201cThe time was right\u201d to introduce the stock ticker and the printing telegraph. It was. Americans, grasping the benefits of his inventions and finding them affordable in relation to those benefits, willingly purchased Mr. Edison\u2019s inventions; he and the capitalists who invested in the enterprise grew rich. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18,24,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy","category-transportation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-64","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":377,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}